Former senators recall Stevens

A former Alaska Senate colleague of the late Sen. Ted Stevens credited the veteran Republican lawmaker with bringing billions back to their state, but said at least some of it went to wasteful defense projects.

“He certainly was the strongest advocate of what I would call the military industry complex. He won on that; I lost,” said Mike Gravel, a Democrat, in POLITICO’s Arena. “We have a nuclear shield in Alaska (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense) that many say doesn’t work and was a boondoggle of money. But he was a believer in that and didn’t find it excessive.”

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When Gravel was state House speaker in the 1960s, Stevens was Republican minority leader. When Gravel was elected to the Senate in November 1968, Stevens suddenly followed when Sen. Bob Bartlett (D-Alaska) died in office that December. Stevens got the appointment and had a one-month jump on Gravel to become the state's senior senator.

Stevens was in many ways the mirror image of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), a master appropriator who wasn’t afraid of throwing his weight around Capitol Hill to win money for his home state, Gravel said.

“The first position he had on Appropriations was the subcommittee on military spending. He was right there at the spigot to make sure money flowed liberally to Alaska,” said Gravel, who was defeated in the 1980 Democratic primary and sought the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. “I think he was effective for the policy issues he believed in. These weren’t policy issues I believed in.”

Still, Gravel recalled liking the famously-gruff Stevens.

“We had a very confrontational relationship on policy issues and didn’t get along,” Gravel said. “On a personal basis I think we got along pretty well. I was at his second wedding. I knew his second wife quite well.”

Former Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minn.), who served with Stevens from 1978-1991, said Stevens’ greatest legacy would be on military issues.

“He and [Sen.] Danny Inouye [D-Hawaii] were either chairman or ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee for decades,” Boschwitz said in the Arena. “Those two guys saw to it that the American military had the latest innovations. They kept America strong. Both were veterans of World War II and understood the needs of the military.”

Former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), an ex-chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also praised Stevens’s passion for military issues, calling him an “absolute inspiration.”

“When he was in the presence of young men and women in uniform and he would modestly share with them the fact that when he was their age, he was in uniform, he just won gleaming admiration,” Warner recalled. “I can see those faces break into a smile and a feeling of comradeship that he was able to immediately evoke in a military audience.

Stevens’s brush with prosecutors, which helped end his Senate career in 2008, was also a sore point among political veterans. Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), who served with Stevens on the Senate Commerce Committee and went camping with the late senator just last month, said “overzealous” Justice Department attorneys “ruined a great career.”

“That was terrible for a man who worked so hard and long for his country. He was a veteran, and for him to go down in defeat in those circumstances was just terrible and very hard on him. But he didn’t show it. He’s a tough guy,” Pressler said in the Arena.

“I’m disappointed in the people of Alaska for not reelecting him, even in the cloud of these charges.”

“Had the public and the Alaska electorate known in 2008 that Sen. Ted Stevens, fine stalwart and patriot, had been convicted through the misconduct of Justice Department lawyers, he would have been reelected and his substantial reputation and legacy left intact,” added Richard V. Allen, national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan in 1981-82.